Vivian Maier, Through a Clearer Lens

No one would find the prospect of posthumous fame more appalling than the photographer Vivian Maier. In life, she fanatically concealed her traces: She liked strong bolts on her doors, fake names (she had at least three in rotation) and what seemed to be a spurious French accent. She rarely discussed or shared her work. Many assumed she was homeless.

“I’m sort of a spy,” she’d tell people. “I’m the mystery woman.”

She died in a nursing home in 2009, at 83, slipping away as anonymously as she’d lived. Her story would have ended there — but she had left riches in her wake.

Among Maier’s possessions were more than 100,000 negatives — a startling body of work imbued with the humanism of Robert Frank and Lisette Model but a mischief all its own. From the 1950s, she had been photographing city life with greedy intensity, capturing vagrants passed out on the Bowery; the carcasses of the Chicago stockyards; Lena Horne, spotted on the street, on a bright autumn day — and, above all, herself. She couldn’t pass a reflective surface — a shop window, a mirror or any shiny piece of metal — without snapping a selfie. In photo after photo, she stares directly at you: a rangy woman with a deadpan expression, wearing a man’s shirt and shoes. Almost immediately upon discovery of her work, she was heralded as one of the 20th century’s great photographers.

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CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

The Maier myth followed. She became the “nanny photographer,” the secretive self-taught genius who tramped around town with a Rolleiflex camera around her neck and her young charges in tow. The eBay enthusiasts who snatched up her negatives at auction with the hopes of reselling them became heroes for saving her from obscurity. One, a real estate agent named John Maloof, bought the bulk of her estate for $400 and made it his mission to share her work with the world. He has published books of her photographs, arranged exhibitions, and co-written and co-directed a documentary, “Finding Vivian Maier” (2013), that was nominated for an Academy Award.

But stories — like snapshots — are shaped by people, and for particular purposes. There’s always an angle. A new biography, “Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife,” by Pamela Bannos, strives to rescue Maier all over again, this time from the men who promulgated the Maier myth and profited off her work; chiefly Maloof, who controlled her copyright for a time. After a legal battle — “the Vivian Mire,” one critic called it — her estate passed into a trust last year, where it will be held for possible heirs and eventually released into the public domain.

The book braids together three strands: a brisk, rather generic history of American photography; a biography of Maier; and a withering account of how the artist has been represented since her death. “My goal was always to recognize and give Maier agency within her own story,” Bannos writes. She tries to dislodge the portrayal of Maier as a mysterious, freakish figure, and to see a person where others have seen mostly pathology: her hoarding and possible paranoia.

Bannos makes the case that Maier lived a much larger, more varied life than assumed. This famous recluse once took a five-month trip around the world as well as a subarctic train expedition, both times traveling with just her camera for company. As for her notorious secrecy, it served a purpose, at least in the beginning. Her parents were frantic dissemblers who struggled to conceal scandals of illegitimacy, abandonment and institutionalization. Of course Maier was wary about sharing her personal details, Bannos reasons: Who would hire a nanny with such a sordid family life?

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Pamela BannosCreditManuela Hung

Nor should we be so struck that Maier never wanted to show her work to anyone. Sharing comes easily, too easily, to us. Not so for Maier, who told a friend that “if she had not kept her images secret, people would have stolen or misused them” — how prophetic that now seems. And her compulsive photographing prefigured our own relationship with our phones, Bannos says, our own desire to constantly document our lives.

In this way, almost point by point, Bannos refutes how Maier has been marketed. And she looks at how it has benefited Maloof et al. to present Maier as a strange, incapable wraith, how it made them look all the more heroic, and allowed them to cavalierly overlook her absolute unwillingness to show her work publicly.

In a strange coincidence, Bannos reports, 21 years after Maier lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where she cared for the dark-haired girl who often appears in her photos, Susan Sontag would move into the penthouse of the very same building and begin the essays in “On Photography.” “Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe,” Sontag wrote in the opening pages of that book. “They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads.”

Biographies and documentaries can tempt us the same way. They can offer the fantasy of absolute knowledge, absolute possession (perhaps this is how Maloof went astray). The achievement of Bannos’s intelligent, irritable self-reflexive study is in its restraint. She unseats the ghost and restores to us the woman — but in her own words and images, and without psychologizing. It’s a portrait as direct as any of Maier’s, and what a distinct pleasure it is to meet her gaze again.